Poetry vs. Hedge Funds

By David Ross. I have often met conservatives who lump poetry with other affectations of the urban left, like eating with your fingers at Ethiopian restaurants and bringing your own hemp-weave shopping bag to the grocery store. Who can dispute that in this perverse age they’re not entirely wrong? Who can dispute that political pose often matters far more than literary prowess? Witness the kerfuffle below (via Powerline):

First poet Alice Oswald withdrew her new book from the contest for the £15,000 award to be conferred with the T.S. Eliot prize administered by the Poetry Book Society, and now, the Guardian reports, Australian poet John Kinsella has joined her. Both poets have been short-listed for the prize, and Oswald is herself a former Eliot prize winner, so their withdrawal is something more than a mere gesture.

What is the cause that impels Oswald’s and Kinsella’s protest? Might it be the genteel anti-Semitism of the poet in whose name the prize is given? Of course not. Rather, it is the source of the beneficence that funds the award. The prize is the beneficiary of a newly-brokered sponsorship by investment management firm Aurum Funds. What’s wrong with Aurum Funds? Aurum is a specialized investment firm comprising a variety of hedge funds.

What’s wrong with hedge funds? Well, Kinsella is a rabid socialist. Moreover, he explained, “Hedge funds are at the very pointy end of capitalism, if I can put it that way.” Former prize winner Oswald observed that “poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions.” Better for the prize money to be laundered through the organs of the state after it is levied from the benighted taxpayers who prefer prose to poetry by the likes of Oswald and Kinsella.

Looking for a little background on Kinsella, we find that he is an Australian poet who describes himself as “a vegan anarchist pacifist of 16 years – …a supporter of worldwide indigenous rights, and an absolute supporter of land rights.” Land rights, mind you, not property rights. Somehow it all makes sense.

Where is the author of The Dunciad when you really need him?

Here, just for the fun of ridicule, is a wretched sonnet by Oswald:

I can’t sleep in case a few things you said
no longer apply. The matter’s endless,
but definitions alter what’s ahead
and you and words are like a hare and tortoise.
Aaaagh there’s no description / each a fractal
sectioned by silences, we have our own
skins to feel through and fall back through / awful
to make so much of something so unknown.
But even I / some shower-swift commitments
are all you’ll get; I mustn’t gauge or give
more than I take / which is a way to balance
between misprision and belief in love
both true and false, because I’m only just
short of a word to be the first to trust.

Let’s compare this word splatter to a recently published poem on a related theme by a true poet, the 90-year-old Richard Wilbur:

Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.

What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.

Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea.

Lovely.

Posted on December 14th, 2011 at 12:31pm.